WE encounter more new-comers in the saloon. Two of them bring copies
of the morning papers. I recognize several of the interesting crowd,
and cannot help telling them something of the conversation of the
Beefsteak Club room guest who drew their pictures in London, as
a warning to the traveller whom they were going to meet. I find
them almost as ill-informed, and quite as entertaining, concerning
Irving’s mannerisms, as was the traveller in question touching
their own occupation. They talk very much in the spirit of what has
recently appeared here in some of the newspapers about Irving and his
art-methods. New York, they say, will not be dictated to by London;
New York judges for itself. At the same time they do not think it a
generous thing on the part of the London “Standard” to send a hostile
editorial _avant-courier_ to New York, to prejudice the English
actor’s audiences and his critics.[2] Nor do they think this “British
malevolence” will have any effect either way, though the “Standard”
practically proclaims Mr. Irving and Miss Terry as impostors. This
article has been printed by the press, from New York to San Francisco,
while the Lyceum Company and its chief are on the Atlantic. I have
often heard it said, in England, that Irving had been wonderfully
“worked” in America. Men who are worthy to have great and devoted
friends unconsciously make bitter enemies. Irving is honored with a few
of these attendants upon fame. If the people who regard his reputation
as a thing that has been “worked” could have visited New York a week
before his arrival they could not have failed to be delighted to
see how much was being done against him, and how little for him. An
ingenious and hostile pamphleteer was in evidence in every bookseller’s
window. Villainous cheap photographs of “actor and manager” were hawked
in the streets. Copies of an untruthful sketch of his career, printed
by a London weekly, were circulated through the mails. The “Standard’s”
strange appeal to New York, Boston, and Chicago was cabled to the
“Herald” and republished in the evening papers. Ticket speculators had
bought up all the best seats at the Star Theatre, where the English
actor was to appear, and refused to sell them to the public except
at exorbitant, and, for many play-goers, prohibitive rates. So far
as “working” went the London enemies of the Lyceum manager were so
actively represented in New York that his friends in the Empire city
must have felt a trifle chilled at the outlook. The operations of the
ticket speculators, it must, however, be admitted, seemed to project in
Irving’s path the most formidable of all the other obstacles.